According to the World Economic Forum, information and communication technology (ICT) literacy is one of the essential skills for the 21st century. Based on this research, we are suggesting there should be a small element of multimodality literacy in your courses if you want your students to keep developing their digital literacy. This literacy can be understood as “the ability to use and create technology-based content, including finding and sharing information, answering questions, interacting with other people and computer programming.” (World Economic Forum, 2015).
The New London Group (1996) first introduced the term “multiliteracies” which promoted the idea that “all meaning-making is multimodal.” Influenced by recent work from NLG members Cope and Kalantzis (pedagogy of multiliteracies) and Kress (multimodal approaches to learning) (2015), multimodality aims to facilitate ways to adapting disciplinary learning experiences to address multimodal literacies and emerging digital media formats.
This book attempts to address how the scholar world has responded to the ever-evolving literacies. First, the authors deepen on the students experience in the world of these evolving literacies. Then, the book invites the reader to reflect upon pedagogy in the classroom. And, lastly, it talks about the implication these literacies have in writing programs. In attempting this three-fold process, the authors offer a variety of examples of multimodal assignments along with theory to present the advantages and difficulties of multimodal pedagogies in the classroom in school and higher educational settings. In the end, the book offers a set of alternatives for traditional composition in the classroom.
The book addresses different questions that most of the PK-12 teachers deal everyday with their students regarding the use of technology in their daily lives and in the classroom: where to begin with teaching or including digital literacies in the classroom? What are the basics of digital literacies in school contexts? How to redesign pre-service and in-service teacher education to help educators guide and work with a highly advanced technological group of students? How to understand this group’s more complex, interconnected and varied literacies? How to teach this youth? In trying to answer these questions the book provides a concrete framework to foster student’s digital literacies based on research pedagogies that can be easily implemented in the classroom.
In this book, Julia Gillen embarks on the exploration of digital literacy and learning, particularly, the study of language in online writing and reading within the framework of sociocultural and linguistic ethnography. The author helps the reader understand the connections between learning, agency, teaching and identity work in the different practices present in digital literacy. She also offers dialogic learning as a pedagogy to embark in a more successful way of teaching students to learn how to communicate within these new modes of communication, in the ecology of digital literacies.
The article begins by laying the context in which adolescents are currently growing and how doing so with technology that never ceases to evolve might affect them in various ways: they are not capable of making long term decisions, which in turn are the ones that help them transition to their adulthood. Hence, Hoffman (2010) provides her research findings to “assess what twenty-first century learning and thinking skills should be developed in young children to prepare them for the digital demands of daily life as they grow into pre-adolescence.” In doing such a task, she provides two practices for aiding students to thrive in this technology-mediated world: choices and decision making, and understanding purpose.
Mattern addresses how to evaluate students in multimodal work when this becomes the normative assessing form of the classroom. She first introduces a teaching strategy called modeling evaluation: she presents students different projects that show features similar to the projects they are going to make with the purpose of critically analyze them so as to have an idea of what is expected from them when it is time to assess their project. Then, she provides the evaluative criteria she has come to create after years of researching. Namely, concept and content, concept/content-driven design and technique, transparent, collaborative development and documentation, academic integrity and openness, review and critique.
The article presents some guidelines for the assessment of digital scholarship in disciplines such as Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. It seeks to aid in the process of hiring or promoting scholars into these areas. It also attempts to extend the understanding of the expansion of higher education policies for supporting and assessing these kinds of scholarships.
In this article, the author desires to encourage teachers to think about multimodal learning as a way to engage students, particularly teenagers, in exploring multiple forms of texts to analyze what these forms mean to their identities and beliefs about the world. Thompson’s principal objective is to criticize the idea that literacy is irrelevant or disconnected to different areas of the curriculum such as social studies, math and science.
In this chapter, the author, acknowledging the way technologies have transformed the way we read, write and interact with each other, evaluates the existing theoretical and empirical work done in digital literacy research thus far and proposes certain guidelines for the future of research on this area. For achieving such a task Warschauer offers 3 frameworks to examine the relationship between technology and literacy: change, power, and learning. The study of these relationships allows to analyze how literacy practices have changed, how politics and power help modelling these changes, and which the consequences are for teaching and assessing literacy in current school settings.